IoT platforms are the central piece in the Internet of Things architecture that connects the real and the virtual worlds to enable communication between objects, manage the data flows, support application development and provide basic analytics for connected IoT devices.

Five types of IoT platform are defined:

1. Connectivity platforms: offer coverage capabilities and solutions for connecting the IoT device, managing and orchestrating connectivity, and provisioning communication services for connected IoT devices.
2. Device management platforms: handle provisioning tasks to ensure connected devices are deployed, configured, and kept up-to-date with regular firmware/software updates.
3. IaaS / Cloud backend platforms: offer a scalable enterprise grade backend for data management of IoT applications and services.
4. Application Enablement Platforms (AEPs): enable developers rapidly create, test, and deploy an IoT application or service.
5. Advanced analytics platforms: offer sophisticated analytics tools including machine learning techniques and streaming analytics capabilities to extract actionable insights from IoT data.